raggedy

call me raggedy.

i am, at this turn in the world, the raggedy-est of raggedy souls. 

for the past four-and-a-half weeks, a sum total of thirty whole days, i’ve been holding my breath, pounding the keys, and aiming to quell the rat-a-tat-tat of my old little heart. i awake before 5, day after day, and tap till well after midnight—as long as the ghost has not given up on me.

it’s the plight of the writer on deadline (and i am starting to wonder if maybe perhaps i’m getting too old for this gig, though i can’t for the life of me imagine a life without the stringing of words into lines, into pages, complete with tables of contents).

there have been sentences to untangle, misplaced modifiers, and a bumper crop of commas where the yield should be leaner. and ideas—some of them big, some of them not so—to refine to their core.

all in all, i’ve been pushed to my depths. and then some.

it’s that book i found myself writing a winter ago, and now, at long last, 202 whole pages of it, have finally, finally been flung back to the editor with all copy-editing queries and scolds duly addressed. 

i cannot for the life of me remember a harder writing assignment, one that cut any closer to the bone than this one. 

and that, i pray, will make all the difference.

not much that’s worth saying comes easy.

i resisted at first, the idea of a book exploring the spiritual insights of cancer, when it first was dangled before my cognitive gears. i pushed it aside, dismissively and emphatically. i could barely tell a soul how deeply scared i’d become since i’d first heard of my cancer, so why in the world would i lift up that fear for all in the world to gawk at? 

but then a funny thing happened: a sisterly crew of glorious writers who i trust through and through read one or two essays, about the ways the cancer had opened my eyes and my soul, and insisted there might be something worth saying. 

what i was saying was that the scary prognoses i’d found every time i looked up my odd little cancer had propelled me into a spiritual depth that has proved most compelling. and stunningly calming, if calm is a word to be found in cancer’s vicinity. 

it’s a knowing that’s ancient, one that sages have been spouting about for ages and ages: our time here is fleeting, our purpose is certain. these are our days to get the job done. there is some urgency here.

cancer, quite curiously, has turned out to be my spiritual guide. has pointed me squarely toward the singular aims of my every last breath: to love and love deeply; to savor each morsel of living (both the light and the shadow); and, more than anything, to chisel my soul to its holiest possible iteration, the one i believe God imagined me to be. God imagines each of us to be. each in our own madcap, magnificent way.

if i have one single word to leave behind in this world, it might be a word—or maybe a string of words—found deep in the pages of the book that now has a name: it’s called broken open, and its one sustaining idea is that deep within our brokenness there lies wisdom and beauty. in all of us. i’ve no corner on that market. sometimes it takes being broken wide open to tap into those veins. 

now six books in, on a shelf with my name, i’ve learned a thing or two about filling a page with vials of neatly-arranged alphabet letters. i’ve had to work mightily: to muscle up my words, to scythe all the frills, and to surgically, surgically sharpen my thoughts. 

i think back to my earliest days in the newsroom, when the marvelous editor who hired me—the one who gave me the one-in-a-million chance to take a crack at news writing in the wake of a life devoted to nursing—used to spill gallons of bright purple ink on my printouts. she had a habit, as she tried to mold her flock of writers, of printing off the rough drafts of their stories, and poring over them with her signature purple pen. she was looking for bloopers and potholes. and she duly drew them to your attention with her marginalia the color of concord grapes.

i was, not so proudly, the queen of purple back then, the writer of prose tilting toward purple—prose that’s dripping with overwrought words, treacly and saccharine, an assault on the insulin pump. our beloved editor (sheila was her name, famous in newsrooms across the land, and often a reader here at the chair) tried mightily to purple it out of me. and maybe at last, 44 years after stepping into the newsroom, i’m beginning to get with the program. 

mostly i’ve spent the last thirty days cutting the fat, clearing the noise, plucking just the right word from the poetic universe. my aim was to pen the purest, clearest, most piercingly true telling of my story. the story of how having a good chunk of lung lifted out from under my rib cage has pointed me to timeless wisdoms and soulful epiphanies. and one or two thoughts that might be worth passing along.

i decided to spare few details, to not skip over the bumps in my past. i wrote of my fears, even the ones that scare me the most. i considered life when i was no longer. and i did not look away. 

when it came to the especially hard parts, where i told the whole truth, i had to take very deep breaths. and that’s why i’m raggedy now. 

but i cling to a knowing that’s proved to be true: we all, every one of us, work from a similar palette of struggles and pains. and if i can show you my bumps and my bruises, let you in on the unspoken unspooling of my scariest hours, then you just might find ballast when your life turns rocky too. or at least know you’re not alone. 

all my life long i’ve seen the beauty in brokenness. and what i want most is for you to see too. to believe it. to lift it up, and marvel—at the fact that despite our foibles and fumbles, despite the many steep hills in our way, we little humans somehow figure out how to muscle our way. along the way we laugh, we love, we weep. but, really, we’re in this together. all of us blundering along for as long as we’re here. and then, heaven only knows . . .

in the end, this is what i know about Broken Open, the book: i have taken the hardest part of my life (to date) and held it up to the light to say, “this is beautiful. behold it.” it is a life riven with cracks, now rivered in gold. just like the japanese kintsugi, the art of repair, which magnifies the beauty in brokenness. and fills in the cracks of the shattered vessel with radiant metals of gold or silver or copper.

thus, i might be raggedy, but i’ve tried mighty hard to pour a wee bit of ore into my cracks.

what’s the hardest thing you’ve done lately?

soon as i can, i’ll show you the cover. i am awaiting the signal from the people in charge. the ones who are daring to let me tell my epiphany story. 

p.s. happy blessed almost birthday to my beautiful and beloved A. xoxoxox